Mountain Oasis Electronic Music Summit announces October dates

Mountain Oasis Electronic Music Summit announced the dates for the new AC Entertainment festival this afternoon, staking claim to the Halloween weekend (or Halloween-adjacent weekend, to be technical).

SAVE THE DATES! Make sure you have October 25 – 27, 2013 on your radar screen and starting planning to join us in Asheville, NC. We’ve got so much excitement in the works that we can barely contain ourselves. We will be letting you know more in the coming weeks so stay in touch!

I’ll keep checking the group’s social media to update ya’ll on developing details.

The Mountain Oasis Electronic Music Summit was announced in December after AC Entertainment said it was parting ways with Moogfest, an annual electronic music festival celebrating electronic music pioneer Bob Moog.

Here’s the story:

The Mountain Oasis Music Summit will be a two- or three-day event built on the same template that made Moogfest a hit for the past three years, said Ashley Capps, the CEO of AC Entertainment. Dates for the event are to be announced.

Moogfest, meanwhile, is also being planned for next year. Moog Music Inc., the Asheville-based manufacturer of synthesizers, theremins and other electronic music gear, owns the Moogfest name and plans to continue a festival that honors company founder and inventor Robert Moog, said Moog Music spokeswoman Emmy Parker.

Moog Music decided recently not to relicense the Moogfest name to AC Entertainment for a fourth fest. Parker declined to elaborate on the decision, other than to say that Moog Music is “in the process of completely reconfiguring the festival from the ground up.”

Moogfest will continue to honor the spirit of Moog, Parker said. The event will also continue to benefit the Moog Foundation, an Asheville nonprofit dedicated to preserving Moog’s archives and learning about the science of sound.

Last month, Moog Music CEO Mike Adams told the Citizen-Times that he wanted Moogfest to remain in Asheville, to grow in size and embrace a broader vision of innovation.

“I definitely think there needs to be a component that celebrates the innovative spirit in Asheville,” Adams said then. “We need to broaden what the festival is about, and we need to make people more aware of the resources here,” he said at the time.

Moogfest was produced by AC Entertainment in 2010, 2011 and in October. Each year, the event has drawn between 6,000 to 8,000 fans of musical acts ranging from Nas and The Flaming Lips to Moby and MGMT. The first two years, the festival covered three days. It was scaled back to a two-day event this October.

Capps said that despite the name change, he wants to build on the success of Moogfest. “We love being in Asheville and doing events there,” said Capps, who is based in Knoxville, Tenn.